August 30, 2015

Murky Sunday morning.

Turned the second, secured harvest of eggplant into a vat of baba ganouge. Invented the recipe, so there was much adding and tasting afterwards, but it finally came out right.

Class Friday was catastrophic, as out of a sea of waving hands and concerned faces I was made to know– or enticed to believe-- that nobody had heard of any of their own history before, and that I had been firing names and events into a room that had no way to understand or contextualize them. “Now, who was Abraham again?”. . . “We never heard of ANY of this before.”  I drew a timeline on the board, and that seemed to help, but I’m going to spend part of today constructing a time line that will at least give them the elements of chronology and a place to hang those difficult names. Part of it is that they were egregiously unprepared for college. Maybe in the shuffle I got one exceptionally ignorant section. Part of it is that they do not think automatically and must be told to use the many resources that are gathered for them on the Internet and the Humanities website. Part of it is this: I see now why my colleagues wanted to abandon the systematic and chronological presentation of civilization: not that the enterprise was unworthy or old fashioned, as they wanted to believe, but because it is too hard. Students are coming with less and less to build on. Secondary education is failing in so many ways, and is compelled to do so because of the press to succeed in one: the standardized test.

Off after class to Jasper, Georgia, to a place called Big Canoe to get my sister married. I thought we were camping in the usual sense, but Big Canoe turns out to be a fairly thickly populated suburb-in-the-woods with rondelays and mansions, a sort of Lorien with houses tucked everywhere up in the trees. Ours was somebody’s vacation home, round and commodious and pleasing. The boys came at night, as they were told not to do, and got lost, but when they finally arrived all was merriment. Wedding in the morning, I officiating in my most amazing capacity of man of the cloth, Jim and Linda now married, and both seeming happy beyond the lot, at least now, of most mortals. They saw a herd of deer while Daniel and I were cooking breakfast.